I’ve been considering the idea of accessible navigation recently. Not specific methods of making navigation accessible, which are part of what I discussed in a post on designing with accessibility in mind, but on the whole idea of what makes navigation accessible.

The principle behind accessible navigation is about providing access to content – not necessarily about creating a menu which can be used by people with disabilities. It’s critical to provide access to your content – but not to make a visually impaired visitor use the same method to get there as a sighted user.

Take a fairly standard dropdown menu as an example. These can be coded very simply in nested lists with CSS. Only a tiny amount of JavaScript is required to make the menu function correctly in Internet Explorer 6. Still, that same menu doesn’t provide access to many documents if a user is using Internet Explorer 6 without JavaScript enabled or if they must navigate using their keyboard. The scripting requirements to make a keyboard accessible dropdown are quite a bit more extensive. Not insurmountable, but still extensive – and with scripting disabled, a little bit strange.

But making the menu accessible isn’t necessarily the most important thing to do. It’s making the content available which should take precedent. Coming back to the idea of a common drop-down menu, a simple method to stop worrying about making those extra parts of the menu perfect is to create intermediary pages.

Thinking from the perspective of information architecture, it hardly seems unreasonable to expect a container for the information within a menu. So create those top-level pages. Rather than only having a menu which requires you to hover over “Dinner” to retrieve the links to the various entrée served, you’ll dedicate a page to listing this information. Viewed from the perspective of a restaurant menu, it seems obvious that you’ll want a page dedicated to listing your meals. A website then provides the added bonus of allowing you to create additional pages for each meal, where you can provide more information.

Yet many websites neglect the top-level category page. Rather than providing this access to their information, that first link is just a placeholder to hold a spot for the drop-down beneath. This small oversight can have an enormous impact on the overall usability of your website. Create redundancy. If you’ve implemented a method of content access which has questionable accessibility, provide an alternative. Make sure that every piece of information on your site is available using a simple, easily navigable link and you’ll have done 90% of what’s needed to get your point across to your site’s visitors.

Web accessibility isn’t about making certain every visitor to a site has an identical experience. Trust me; they won’t. A sighted user may be wowed by your beautiful flash navigation even while they’re horribly frustrated by your puzzling navigation scheme — a visually impaired user will just be frustrated. You need to focus on providing a satisfying experience to every user, regardless of access tools or personal capabilities.